22 October 2014

The attached and downloadable
document linked below is made up of extracts from Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?”

In this book Lenin was
concerned to oppose what he called “economism”, which is also called
“syndicalism” and in South Africa in the past and still up to now, called
“workerism”.

Lenin was concerned to show,
following the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s gradualist, reformist “Evolutionary Socialism”
of 1899, and Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution?”
published in 1900, that a revolutionary transformation of society was not
possible without a revolutionary political party of the working class.

In a Preface to the book, Lenin explained that
various internal political matters within the Russian Social-Democratic and
Labour Party (RSDLP) had caused him to hold the book back; if the outcome of
these inner-party struggles had been different, then the book would have been
written differently, Lenin wrote.

In Chapter 1, it is clear that the initial
thrust of Lenin’s polemic is directed against Eduard Bernstein, just as Rosa
Luxemburg’s was, in 1900.

Trade union organisation of
the working class was never going to be sufficient for revolution. Lenin showed
that the workers’ vanguard political party, the communist party, remains a
“must-have”.

“What Is To Be Done?” is the
book where Lenin most clearly differentiated the reformist mass
organisations from the vanguard political party of the working class,
the communist party. The attached and downloadable file contains the passages
that are most directly relevant to this point.

“What Is To Be Done?” is for
this reason regarded as the generative blueprint for the Communist Parties as
we know them, and of the form that they took after the October, 1917 revolution
in Russia and in particular following the formation of the Comintern in 1919.

The SACP is one such Party, formed in 1921
under the Comintern’s rules and at the same time admitted to membership of that
organisation, as it remained until the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943.

The blueprint is most precisely seen in Part C, “Organisation of Workers and Organisation of
Revolutionaries”, which is included in the linked document.

Lenin concludes: “…our task is not to champion the degrading
of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.”

Next in this part, we will
look at Lenin’s report of the Second Congress of the RSDLP.